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MacRuby 0.7 released

The MacRuby developers have announced the release of MacRuby 0.7. The latest version of the Ruby variant built to run native on Mac OS X, is described as a consolidation release, improving the functionality that already exists by offering better Ruby compatibility, concurrency, Cocoa support and better overall performance and stability. MacRuby is now only supported on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) ending the support of previous versions of Apple's operating system.

Among the improvements, developers can now pass Ruby code to Cocoa functions that expect to call back to Objective C / C code. This feature does require new metadata though, which will be supplied in an upcoming BridgeSupport update. Sandboxes, which limit access to selected functionality within a process, are now supported allowing code to be downloaded by an application and executed safely. MacRuby 0.7 is also the first release which targets the 1.9.2 version of the Ruby language. It now passes 90% of the RubySpecs tests, up from 82% in previous versions, but it is still unable to run Rails "out of the box"; the developers hope to fill in the missing pieces needed in the next release. Web developers though should consider ControlTower, a recently introduced web framework for MacRuby which is based on Rack and is currently able to run Sinatra based applications.

The release notes for MacRuby detail the changes in version 0.7. MacRuby 0.7 is available to download (direct download) now and the developers ask for feedback on any issues or problems. The source code of MacRuby is available under the Ruby Licence.